The present invention relates generally to a photographic image data management system for a visual system, and more particularly for a flight simulator visual system.
Disk based visual image generators have been used for several years. They typically store a digitized aerial image in sections on a disk and use some type of digital scan converter to distort the visual information and present the image to the viewer at the proper perspective. These systems have realistic images because they are based on aerial photographs, but are complex and expensive. One problem is that the aerial photography often must be obtained using a special camera. Another is that in order to provide a real-time simulation, many disks must be used or a lot of preprocessing must be done on the imagery and stored in some type of very large temporary memory.